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Panasonic Announces an End To Plasma TVs In March
An anonymous reader writes "You thought Halloween was for treats. Not this time. Panasonic announced to its investors today that its plasma TV business would be over by the end of March 2014." Blacker blacks and brighter whites aside, there are some good reasons for the shift.
I mean, OK, we all know that electronic devices have a truncated lifespan... but when you go to buy a plasma TV, they make a point to tell you it will only work for about 50,000 hours, after which you have to go buy a brand new one. Hence the reason all the flat panels I own (which were bought before LED TV prices started to come down) are LCD and not plasma.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
CNET's very top TVs for image quality only are Panasonic plasmas :(
everyone i know who prefers LCDs have taken to heart weird ass rumors regarding plasma (unstoppable burn in; must sit exactly 10 ft from it; everything looks cell shaded; etc.)
hope my kuro doesnt die before someone makes a proper 4k set (only going to use it for large screen computer gaming)
This is a real sham - Plasma TVs, and Panasonic ones specifically (the ST60 model lineup) are consistently the highest rated TVs out there. CNET has several article devoted to why should only buy plasma tvs and not LCD. The main reasons? Significantly better colors, no motion blur, wider view angles. I have a Panasonic TC-P60ST60 and it looks amazing. The real reason that LCD sell better? They do look better in bright rooms, though not by much. What room is the brightest of them all? Bestbuy show floors so that is where the comparison is made, not your living room.
Plasma sets put out so much RFI that it makes working HF hell if one is in your neighborhood.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
In Europe and Asia energy costs are high, so using an energy hungry TV makes little sense. Once these markets start shifting, a portion of the US market is no longer a sufficient reason to keep a manufacturing line open
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The comment I'm replying to is the perfect example of why people are so tired of Obama-haters:
Because you can't seem to limit yourselves to talking about how much you hate his healthcare plan (or anything else about him for that matter), even when it has absolutly nothing to do with the topic at hand.
You don't like his plan: everybody everwhere in the world has heard your complaints about a million times already; give it a goddamn rest.
Just save your two minutes of hate for the next "What's wrong with HealthCare.gov?" article of which there is sure to be one every day for the next few months.
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I sold TVs for a couple years between 2006 and 2009, and I got to scrutinize a lot of screens side by side. It wasn't until LED backlights became common that LCDs could even begin to compare to the color accuracy of plasma screens. Unfortunately, customers would often come in already convinced that plasma screens had all kind of problems, some of which were extremely overblown or had been vastly improved since the early models (burn-in, lifespan); and others that were complete baloney (some salespeople at other stores had been telling customers that touching a plasma screen would ruin it). I suppose it was inevitable since Panasonic is alone on that front and LCDs are evolving much faster. If I could buy any TV I wanted today, it would still be one of Panasonic's high-end plasma models. Oh well. I still have my trusty 42 inch one and I hope to get quite a few more years out of it.
Disclaimer: I own a top of the line 54" Panasonic plasma set from a couple years ago and enjoy its excellent picture quality.
If you walk into a Best Buy or any other retail store and head over to the TV section, what immediately hits you is the brightness of most of the LCD sets and the comparatively subdued brightness coming from any (remaining) plasma sets still on the floor. In the unscientific forced side-by-side comparison environment of a brightly lit store, the LCD panels just show better.
It's the same reason that many folks think they'll prefer shiny laptop screens or speakers that deliver booming lows and super highs. It all seems better in a snap judgment... It's not until you take it home and have to live with it for a few hours that you start to realize that matte screens are easier on the eyes, speakers with more natural frequency response are easier on the ears and that LCD TVs (usually demoed in torch mode) need to be turned down to a more tolerable brightness level (well within the realm of what a plasma can do) during extended viewing sessions.
The marketing spin has been incredible, specifically over the last 5 years against plasma, somehow the entire "LED vs LCD" thing managed to paint the LED lit panels as the definitive display technology (those of us who understand colour depth, contrast, banding and just plain old "moving nicely" / refresh rate know this is simply not the case)
I managed to pick up earlier this year the second best display in the 2012 / 2013 (ST50) series, 65" - I love the thing, apparently the last Panasonic the ST60 has display lag, bad for gamers- however that could be unfounded and surprising for a plasma.
So for those of us that detest LCD screens (and that's mostly the plasma buyers and video enthusiasts) - we all best hope the OLEDs take off. I finally did some actual research for about 8 hours a few months back to get a better understanding of OLED and yeah ok, I finally get it. We've got a plasma and CRT killer here, finally (LCD and LED were never in the running) the blacks are incredible, the colour range is apparently larger / wider than what the high end digital video cameras can even capture for film, the refresh rate is in the tens or hundreds of thousands of times per second (?!) it's also the thinnest and it uses little power. Viewing angles astonomical, Burn in is a potential issue (slowly getting better) and overall display life is also a potential issue (again, slowly getting better)
We finally have one available to actually buy, in TV form (55" OLED in Korea is now on sale, a measly $10,000) - but considering it's a new tech, I'm actually surprised it's that cheap. ... around 5 years, we'll see 70 / 80 / 90 / 100" OLED displays for about 2 to 6k$ - same old premium price for the big HDTV boys budget who can afford a new toy.
My guess is that in
I do hope to see them on PC desks eventually too. LCD / LED movement is horribly grainy and nasty, I just can't deal with it.
(One more thing, I'd heard Panasonic was doing a joint research lab with someone to move to OLED? So perhaps their days as a premium display manufacturer are not over)
Either way, hope my Panasonic doesn't die for at least 3 or 4 years.